#Walk Through The Belly Of A Tornado In Virtual reality On May 20, 2013, a massive tornado slammed into Moore, Oklahoma, killing 24 people and leaving 353 injured,
and causing nearly $2 billion in damage. The tornado was determined to be an EF5, the most destructive type of tornado on the Enhanced Fujita classification scale.
Because tornadoes are lived so short (and also really destructive) it is difficult for scientists to get a good look inside these disasters.
But now, researchers at Virginia Tech are able to walk inside a virtual reality version of the Moore tornado
seeing the disaster from all angles. The researchers built the visualization using radar data taken during the storm.
While wearing an Oculus Rift headset, researchers can walk around inside a four-story tall theater on the Virginia Tech campus,
transforming the room into the Moore, Oklahoma landscape. For the user, it's like walking into a giant weather map,
with various rain clouds virtually scattered about the space and an immense funnel that darts about the room.
The experience, which New Scientist posted on Youtube is more akin to CNN holograms than Twister;
there are no flying cows, and rain clouds appear as big blobs of different colors, just as they would on your local weather forecast.
Eventually, researchers hope that they can model storms using this technology in something close to real time--looking inside a storm as it develops.
That way they can better predict how bad the tornado might be before it touches down n
#Boeing Just Patented A Force field Made Of Lasers So, Boeing just patented a force field. Technically, the patent is for a ethod and system for shockwave attenuation via electromagnetic arc,
but that just a long way of writing out something unbelievably futuristic: protective force fields may one day make their way onto the battlefields of the future.
The device as patented only protects against the shockwave of an explosion, but most of the vehicles it be mounted on are armored already enough to protect people inside from the shrapnel that comes with a bomb blast.
The concept uses a sensor to detect an explosion in water or air--say, an IED on the side of the road--then estimates the time and location of the explosion.
Next, the signal from the sensor triggers a laser (or a blast of electricity or microwave energy) that heats up a section of air or water
creating a plasma shield in between the explosion and the vehicle. The plasma's temperature and density help deflect
and absorb the shockwaves from the explosion. In the patent illustration, the force field protects a military HMMWV,
but the design is written broadly enough that it can potentially protect everything from ships to submarines, offshore platforms, ground vehicles, buildings,
and even humans. For blasts of different magnitudes, calculating the size and strength of the force field may be tricky.
For example, a lightly armored vehicle like a HMMWV might use the force field against a small explosion
while heavier-armored tanks and MRAPS could save their plasma blasts for only larger threats.
The system will have a database of bomb explosion signatures so it knows just which strategy to use.
This patent promises a lot, but wel have to wait until it tested before we can tell if it the future of war or just a bunch of hot air.
Watch this strange Star wars-themed explainer below n
#Terminator 2 like"smart liquid metal"developed by Tsinghua University researchers These diagrams from the Advanced Materials journal show stages of the Tsinghua University experiment,
which is titled"Self-Fueled Biomimetic Liquid Metal Mollusk, "including the insertion of the aluminum"fuel"(b)
and movement/fusion of gallium alloy droplets (e). Tsinghua University scientists led by Jing Liu, have discovered a'smart'liquid metal alloy that moves on its own.
The liquid metal is a mixture of gallium, indium and tin. It stays liquid at temperatures above-2 degrees Fahrenheit(-19 Celsius),
can move itself in a circle, straight line, or even squeeze through complex shapes when placed in a sodium hydroxide solution.
Its integrated power source is a flake of aluminum embed in the liquid metal; the aluminum reacts with the sodium hydroxide to release hydrogen gas,
while placing the aluminum in the liquid metal drop's rear creates differences in electrical charges across the liquid metal.
The charge differences in differing parts of the liquid metal causes movement, as the liquid metal physically adjusts itself to balance out the resulting differences in internal pressure.
Currently, a drop of liquid metal has enough power to move around for 30 minutes to an hour.
Nanotechnology could be used to build the embedded control system, sensors and computers for any liquid metal robot.
Certain gallium allows can undergo controlled shapeshifting once an electric charge in applied. It might be basic research now
but self healing metals would have a lot of civilian and military applications. Liquid metal may be the first step in a new arms race.
In 2014, both Tsinghua University and North carolina State university discovered that applying electrical currents to gallium alloys (like the liquid metal) would allow for controlled shape-shifiting in the metal
(though they still needed an external power source). The liquid metal has been observed to not just to move on its own,
but also to squeeze into tight spaces as it moves forward (moving the aluminum component can change its direction).
Tsinghua's liquid metal is still a basic research project confined to the laboratories (not to mention vats of sodium hydroxide,
until they discover a way for the liquid metal to react with the atmosphere). The liquid metal could be used to build self contained pumps that don't require outside power or batteries, saving on weight and complexity for items like night vision and laser cooling pumps.
The ability of liquid metal with its own embedded power source could even one day be the basis to build self repairing armor on tanks and changing aircraft fuselages for fuel efficiency and speed.
If you really wanted to build a robot like Skynet's T-1000 Terminator out of shapeshifting metal at room temperature
(and we strongly advise against that), you'd need a substance like Tsinghua University's self powered liquid metal to avoid those embarrassing and inconvenient electrical cords.
More distantly Liu hopes that his invention would one day be used to build shapeshifting robots to repair pipelines and delivery medicine inside blood vessels.
But military engineers would also probably like to take a crack at turning liquid metal into shape shifting drones and robots, familiar to Terminator 2 fans as Skynet's T-1000.
This makes the project both exciting for the future of science and war, as well as a sign that John Connor probably should stay away from China in the future e
#This Sleeve Will Help Save PITCHERS'Arms Motus mthrow Brian Klutch Sensors: Gyroscopes, accelerometers Weight:
14 grams Battery life: 8 hours Price: $170 Problem: Hurtling fastball, after curveball, after slider puts incredible strain on a pitcher arm,
which, over time, can cause painful tears in the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL). To make matters worse,
pitching coaches can do little to predict the injury. They look at certain metrics--throwing speed and pitch count--to guess
when a player arm might be in overdrive, but those aren all that accurate. Last year, for example, 30 Major league Baseball (MLB) pitchers were benched to undergo UCL reconstructions,
dubbed Tommy John surgery after the first player to get it, in 1974. Solution: During spring training this year, more than 10 MLB teams began using the Motus mthrow motion-tracking system to keep tabs on pitchersarm health.
Players wear a 1. 3-inch device with three gyroscopes and three accelerometers just above the elbow inside a compression sleeve.
An app creates a 3-D model of the arm movement and calculates things like UCL torque and arm angle.
Coaches get a snapshot of performance and alerts if signs of fatigue (say, a drop in elbow height) appear.
More precise data helps coaches make arm-saving decisions such as pulling a pitcher when his arm needs rest.
The Pitch Bryan Christie Design After Tommy John surgery pitchers are out of rotation for an average of one year
#Putting Sensors In Bridges And Tunnels Could Make Their Walls Talk Trying to get a building to tell you how it feeling is,
well, like talking to a brick wall. But it doesn have to be that way. Researchers with the GENESI project want to make it so walls can talk back,
by creating various sensors to fit inside buildings, tunnels, and bridges. With the feedback collected from these sensors,
inspectors will have a better understanding of how a city's infrastructure is holding up GENESI is an awkward acronym for reen sensonr NETWORKS for Structural monitoring.
Funded by the European union GENESI puts sensors into a city's various structures to let them"communicate"their status. These sensors include ibrating strain gauges, displacement meters, pressure sensors, temperature sensors,
and soil moisture sensors.""To conserve power, they have energy harvesting capabilities, and engineers can periodically wake them up to get fresh readings from the sensors and check for any changes.
One of GENESI two pilot projects is a testbed in the tunnels of Rome underground rail system,
where wire sensors that pick up strain from vibration were placed inside certain concrete segments. Data loggers record the data,
transmitting the information to a wireless setup and relay system, which then sends it out via cell networks to a remote server.
From there, presumably civil engineers have access to the data and can use it to inform future maintenance planning
and repair schedules. The sensing system is great but powering sensors--even really efficient sensors--requires some form of electric charging or battery replacement.
Renewable energy is tricky in tunnels, since the sun's rays don't reach that far. But each GENESI node and sensor includes a miniature wind turbine that harvests energy from passing trains.
For all other sensors, whether tucked away in tunnel walls or nestled in dark unlit crevices under bridges,
replacing batteries isn always the easiest task for humans, so that might be a future job for drones.
If systems like GENESI become widespread, they could drastically improve city infrastructures, or at least infrastructure maintenance stateside.
If not, or at least if they don make it to the U s, . expect to see more yelling at brick walls,
like John Oliver does below e
#Tiny Drones Can See The World Like Insects Do Drones with better fly-sighttiny insect drones could be useful for disaster-area surveillance
or delivering supplies to people in accessible places. But the technology is still new, and they run a high risk of running into each other in confined spaces.
Now researchers from The swiss Federal Institute of technology have created an artificial eye and navigation system for these drones based on insectsvision,
according to a study published recently in The Royal Society Interface. This isn the first attempt to put streamlined insect-inspired sensors into drones
but it the first time it been done for such tiny drones (others have tried to hook them up with bulky digital cameras.
Insect-style vision works well for drones because it doesn have very high resolution, but it is highly sensitive to objectsmovement
or changes in how light is reflectederfect for maneuvering drones through small spaces with lots of obstacles.
The artificial eye The swiss researchers designed weighs only two milligrams. It made of three photodetectors with a lens on top.
With the combination of data from the photodetectors, which are arranged in a triangular configuration, the device can determine the speed and direction in its view,
no matter if the room is lit poorly or in bright outdoor conditions. And it can do it all three times faster than real-life insects
the researchers told MIT Tech Review. Since they have developed already the algorithms and design of the photosensor,
the researchers plan to configure several artificial eyes on one drone to create a more sophisticated visual system,
allowing it to take off, land, and stabilize its flying position while in the air. They also plan to develop a strip of artificial eyes into ision tape,
a flexible patch that can be attached to any type of surface, such as other types of robots or even furniture or clothing u
#A New Kind of Brain Scan Can See Your Pain, Literally Nothing hurts Americans more than chronic pain.
It our single biggest health problem, affecting the lives of 100 million adults--more than heart disease, cancer,
and diabetes combined. And that figure, from a 2011 Institute of Medicine report, doesn even count kids in pain, veterans with devastating war injuries,
or people in nursing homes. Yet despite the fact that chronic pain is the primary reason Americans receive disability benefits, its one of the least understood afflictions.
Medical schools teach doctors almost nothing about it, spending a median of nine hours on the topic over four years.
The federal govern ment puts absurdly few dollars toward research: $4 a year for every person in pain versus $2, 562 for every person with HIV/AIDS.
One big reason for the lack of resources is that there no objective way to confirm that pain exists.
The good news, finally, is that scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston have unveiled a new brain-scanning method that allows doctors to see chronic pain in exquisite detail for the first time.
The technique, a merger of PET (posi tron emission tomography) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), clearly identifies that a patient is hurting,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention The new method produced dramatic images showing how glial cells
wee seen this in animal studies, says Marco Loggia, who led the MGH team. ut this is the first time we have proof that it works the same way in humans,
and it a big step forward. The magnitude of these findings extends beyond the science. Many patients with chronic pain are viewed mistakenly by clinicians
Without a blood test or biomarkers for pain, they fight skeptics and suffer through trial-and-error treatments.
says Loggia. n five to 10 years, we could potentially have a pill to do just that. e
#New Japanese Glasses Block Facial recognition Computers are really, really good at recognizing faces. Refined through work on millions of uploaded and tagged faces at sites like Facebook and elsewhere,
algorithms that identify faces can place people in locations based just on a photograph. Sometimes that helpful, like figuring out who that obscured groomsmen is in the back of a wedding picture.
For people who don want to be found, or just enjoy the previously unquestioned ability to travel without being tracked,
facial recognition poses a risk. As a solution, Japan National Institute of Informatics (NIII) created glasses that make faces unreadable to machines.
First question: will fashion accomodate the technology? It hard to conceal a face when it requires a style of glasses that no one else is wearing.
Tests with smartphone cameras showed that the glasses fooled facial recognition 90 percent of the time.
Previous attempts to hide faces from computers have resorted to eye-catching makeup or dangling lights from baseball caps.
theyl be on sale next June at a price of around $240. Motherboard b
#A Team Of MIT Bartender Robots Serves Beer More Efficiently Using robots, a team at MIT Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory has solved an ancient problem:
needing another beer but not wanting to stand up and get it. Two small Turtlebots (which look like coolers on wheels) travel between a beer-providing PR2 robot bartender
and rooms of students at work, asking the students if they need a beer and then returning with a beverage
if one is ordered. Bartending is a good task to demonstrate machine teamwork: the waiterbots each check in with a room full of humans,
MIT sees it as a potential system for hospitals or rescue work, and it easy to imagine the same robots that here dispense beer instead taking orders for water bottles and crackers at an emergency shelter.
That a major distinction from other bartending robots, which tend to focus more on specialized drink preparation than maximum drink dispersal.
#Google Restructures Itself To Form'Alphabet,'A New Supercompany Google, the company that owns Youtube,
Android and Chrome, is reorganizing. Instead of the massive supercompany called Google, it will be a massive supercompany called Alphabet,
with Google still being its largest subsidiary. According to a blog post by Google CEO Larry page, who will now be the CEO of Alphabet,
this restructuring allows the new conglomerate of companies to be more independent and better managed.
Sergey Brin, the current president of Google, will become the president of Alphabet, while Sundar Pichai, the current head of Google android and Chrome divisions,
will be the next CEO of Google. A screenshot of abc. xyz, the site for Alphabet, which now owns Google.
Google will be slimmed down, ostensibly to web services, while other pursuits like Calico (Google war on aging) and Life sciences (developing the glucose-sensing contact lens) are split into separate entities.
Alphabet will also include Google Wing drone delivery attempt and its X lab, as well as its Venture and Capital investment companies.
Also, if you click the period after mention of the self-driving car on Page's blog post,
you're taken to a fake Hooli. xyz site, featuring the Google-esque company from HBO's Silicon valley.)
Based on Google's SEC filing, the merger will happen later this year, and Alphabet will report the company's Q4 earnings.
Under the new operating structure, its main Google business will include search, ads, maps, apps, Youtube and Android and the related technical infrastructure (the oogle business.
Businesses such as Calico, Nest, and Fiber, as well as its investing arms, such as Google Ventures and Google Capital,
and incubator projects, such as Google X, will be managed separately from the Google business. Here's a pretty good summary, via tweet:
Alphabet will replace Google as the publicly-traded entity, according to the post. The change will happen automatically,
and all shareholders will have the same number of shares and the same rights. Google, which will be owned by Alphabet,
will be also continue to be traded as GOOG and GOOGL on the Nasdaq. The move seems to have been coming for a while.
Google registered abc. xyz, Alphabet new domain, in March 2014, according to Yoni Appelbaum, editor at The Atlantic.
Why the name Alphabet? Page says that the alphabet integral to Google's search function,
the basis of all the company's success."Alpha"is also an investment return above benchmark
(which business-types like). rom the start, wee always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have wrote,
Page. He then talks about being crazy. But only time will tell on this one o
#Home-brewed Synthetic Opioids Are Finally A Reality Pain-relieving opioids, like morphine or codeine, are important for medical purposes.
The drugs have been around for millennia however even today they are made still from poppy flowers,
making the production of the drugs dependent on poppy farming. Now, for the first time, researchers from Stanford university have been able to synthesize opioids from yeast cultures grown in the lab,
according to a study published today in Science. This isn the first attempt to synthesize opioids.
Researchers have been trying to do it for years in order to produce opioids more quickly or even alter them to be less addictive.
But the poppy plant chemical processes proved to be surprisingly difficult to replicate in the labn the most recent attempt, earlier this year,
the researchers only made it two-thirds of the way to a full opioid. But this study was different.
The researchers engineered yeast to first synthesize thebaine, a basic ingredient and precursor to producing opioids,
over a 72 hour period and using sugar as a food source. By further engineering the yeast they created hydrocodone, a common semisynthetic opioid.
The final pathway that yielded the hydrocodone their final product, expressed 23 different enzymes usually found in plants, mammals, bacteria, and yeast.
would require thousands of liters of fermentation broth, which no home brewer would reasonably pursue.
But that being said, in the next few years they do hope to engineer yeast that can produce much higher yields of opioids
At the University of Cambridge, scientists have created a"mother robot"that can not only build smaller robots,
The lab's work was published in PLOS One. In the study, the researchers gave a robot the task of designing a robot capable of movement using blocks and a motor.
#DNA Can Store Your Digital data For Up to 2, 000 Years Your DNA holds an incredible amount of information in a very small space.
Recently, researchers have looked to DNA as a method to store large amounts of digital information that are saved currently on hard drives.
Our hard drives may seem pretty stable for now, but because of what they're made of,
Internet pioneer Vint Cerf warned that, e are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it.
A team of swiss engineers hope to employ DNA as a method to store more data.
Today our hard drives can store up to five terabytes of data, encoded with the zeros and ones of binary code.
But if data were stored in DNA, the four chemical nucleotides (A c, G, and T) could theoretically hold up to 300,000 terabytes.
The researchers also wanted to see if the DNA would be able to retain information longer than a hard drive does now
(which is about a few decades). They encoded DNA with 83 kilobytes of text written in the 13th and 10th centuries.
They stored the DNA in silica spheres to protect it, and then warmed it to 160 degrees Fahrenheit for a weekhe equivalent of keeping it at 50 degrees for 2, 000 years.
When the researchers decoded the DNA, they found no errors, indicating that the DNA held up well
and the information they encoded stayed intact. It not likely that your next computer will store your data in DNA.
It still prohibitively expensive, and there no system to search and archive the informationomething The swiss researchers plan to look into in the near future.
could be used to repair devices in water-filled environments that are difficult to access, such as the human body,
the researchers uncovered the genetic code for the proteins that allow the teeth to heal themselves when broken.
The researchers then made the proteins into a rubbery plastic by mixing them with a solvent
amorphous part of the protein that gives the plastic its self-healing properties and a more structured sheet of amino acids that give it a solid structure.
could be used to repair devices in water-filled environments that are difficult to access, such as the human body,
the researchers uncovered the genetic code for the proteins that allow the teeth to heal themselves when broken.
The ring teeth of various species of squid Demirel Lab/Penn State via Penn State News The researchers then made the proteins into a rubbery plastic by mixing them with a solvent
amorphous part of the protein that gives the plastic its self-healing properties and a more structured sheet of amino acids that give it a solid structure.
Material that heals itself in the presence of water could extend the usability of biomedical implants
The researchers next plan to study how their technology could help heal wounds n
#Can You Catch Alzheimer? The gradual loss of memory and thinking skills caused by Alzheimer disease are debilitating.
Scientists aren quite sure what causes the condition, but have hypothesized long that the disease results from a combination of genetic, environmental,
and lifestyle factors. Now a team of British researchers might have discovered a new cause: transmissible clumps of proteins called prions.
but can sometimes cause disease. Unlike bacteria or viruses, prions don have any of their own DNA;
they cause disease when they become misfolded so that they can no longer function properly, and they propagate throughout the brain.
Many of the resulting diseases, such as Creutzfeldt-jakob disease (CJD), have long incubation periods but eventually lead to death.
as children, received a medical procedure that was later found to transmit prions. They all died of CJD between the ages of 36 and 51.
thought to be a driver of Alzheimer disease. In fact, four patients had uite substantial Alzheimer-like pathology,
says John Collinge, one of the authors of the study said in a press conference. n that age group you don really see this sort of pathology;
it only really seen in elderly individuals unless you have a genetic predisposition to it,
and none of these patients did suspected. he researchers that other prion diseases might increase the production of amyloid beta,
so they checked the records of 116 other patients with different types of prion disease.
But they note that medical procedures like surgery or blood transfusions could play a role in transmitting prions,
putting patients at a higher risk of developing Alzheimer. There is no evidence of this connection yetnd,
as a spokesperson from The british Department of health points out, a small study of eight patients isn yet cause for alarmut the researchers hope to investigate how prions could be transmitted in a medical setting in the near future e
#Nose-Like Biosensor Sniffs Out Stinky Drinking water Electronic noses can detect bugs, disease or even explosives.
geosmin (GSM) and 2-methylisoborneol (MIB. And while these molecules aren harmful in water, they smell earthy and musty, respectively,
Water quality experts have to test water samples in a lab to determine whether these molecules are in drinking water, a process that is expensive and time-consuming.
A team of South korean researchers has developed a simple sensor based on the human nose to sniff out the smelly molecules.
The sensor is coated with special proteins called olfactory receptors that bind to the molecules when they are present.
In this particular sensor the researchers found human olfactory receptors that react to GSM and MIB,
and bound them in carbon nanotubes. When the molecules are present, the carbon nanotubes light up. In tests, the researchers found that their device could detect GSM and MIB concentrations as low as 10 nanograms per liter of water,
or 10,000 parts per trillion. That's not quite as sensitive as the human nose, which can detect GSM at just 5 parts per trillion,
but it's a good start. A device like this one would help water quality technicians detect contaminants quickly and on site
preventing the delay caused by lab testing. But the researchers think their device could be used to detect many other contaminants in water or air.
Or it could be used in different applications in the perfume or cosmetic industry, or even to spot explosives in airports r
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